


Include Women in the Sequel

by MissWoodhouse



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: ...because some of them weren't, Early American Feminism, Gen, I did NOT say all of them were going to be in favor of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 22:15:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6538591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissWoodhouse/pseuds/MissWoodhouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A timeline of just how long it took for that sequel Angelica vowed to see. Or, women's rights in the nation’s early days, as told from the perspective of various Hamilton characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Include Women in the Sequel

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Equal Pay Day; see the end notes for more detailed historical info

**1776: Give my regards to Abigail** (Jefferson)

 

John Adams was in a mood this morning. The statement in and of itself was unsurprising, but Jefferson was sure he’d spotted a fresh letter from Abigail, and that usually left him far more congenial, if liable to talk one’s ear off about the contents. It must have been bad news then – maybe one of the children was ill or injured. Jefferson wouldn't exactly call Adams his friend, more like his…fond enemy, his foil if he was feeling narratively inclined, which he usually was. But an Adams who was out of sorts _after_ a letter from Abigail was liable to even more difficult than usual, so Jefferson figured it was in everyone's best interests to find out what the matter was and what, if anything, could be done about it.

 

“Everyone well at Braintree?”

 

“Fine.” Adams barely graced Jefferson with a reply before returning to the letter in his hands. On closer inspection, it wasn’t worry that marred his countenance, it was anger.

 

“Only I ask because I noticed you had another letter this morning.”

 

“Yes, Abigail has been sending me her thoughts on our declaration.”

 

Everyone knew that much - Abigail's opinionizing had been much discussed both in front of and behind her husband’s back. But Adams liked her analyses, so the impertinence of being advised by his wife didn't explain the anger.

 

“You disagree with her then?” The added, ‘for once’ went unspoken.

 

“We…disagreed over a letter last month, and she has not taken kindly to my response.”

 

Adams showed him the letter. It’s length was short, restrained – abrupt, even. But the hand, far from Mrs. Adams’ usual delicate loops, was an angular, angry scrawl:

_John,_

_If you feel so enchained by the thoughts emanating from my petticoats, then I shall cease to burden you with their expression. The children are well, and that is an end to what you must wish to know._

 

The final period was enlarged by an emphatic splatter.

 

“What on earth have you said to engage this Fury?” In denying him her much-read letters, Abigail had struck her husband hard, for what offense Thomas could not imagine.

 

“She wrote to me a concern over the role of women in our new state. Well, I say wrote a concern, but really, if you shall please me by not repeating this, she levied a demand, with threat of further revolution, that women be granted equal representation with men. I assumed she must have meant the proposal as a joke –really, she must have known it was impossible to seriously consider it – and told her as much. She accused us of perpetuating a tyranny over women, to which I countered that while man may command the political sphere, there can be no doubt that we come home only to be subjugated to the will of the wife. And now she proves me right of course, by promising not to write.”

 

 

**1777: Two steps forward, One step back** (Angelica)

 

Last July, Angelica read the Declaration of Independence and swore she’d live to see the day when women were included in this talk of revolution. She'd make it happen if she had to take hold of Thomas Jefferson’s elegant pen herself. Now, barely a year into this war, and that particular issue appears to have fared better in the hands of the British! No sooner did New York declare its statehood, than it explicitly denied women the right to vote. Not that it would have mattered anyway, unless her new husband met a quick and untimely end, because only widows owning property had held the right before. But she might have, some day.

 

“Remember the ladies” indeed! She might just have to join Mrs. Adams in her threats to “foment a rebellion” if women did not receive their share of this war’s liberty. Angelica did her share in the tea boycott, and participated in as much revolutionary discourse as men were willing to allow her, which was much as anyone in the Continental Congress had done for the war. Those men hadn’t sat in the kitchen, experimenting with tea leaf alternatives so they would have something to serve her father’s revolutionary guests, as Angelica and her sisters had. They’d merely complained that it was a pity no one could manage to get the taste quite right.

 

**1791: French Eloquence** (Angelica, pt. 2)

 

It was rather funny, for Angelica to find the sequel she’d promised to wrangle out of Jefferson all the way across the ocean, and in a different language to boot! Of course, Jefferson had been here too, and any resemblance to his Declaration of Independence in Olympe de Gouges’ work was a result of Jefferson’s propensity for quoting himself while he helped Lafayette write the _Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen_. Angelica’s authorship goals not withstanding, de Gouge had done a clever job, brilliantly arguing the unfair exclusion of women from the prior document. She barely had to change most of the language, but what a difference it made! How could any nation claim to be built upon equality, while denying the rights of such a large class of people? With an eye on France, Angelica only hoped that Olympe’s remarks regarding a woman’s “right to mount the scaffold” did not prove prophetic.

 

**1792: I've been reading common sense** (Burr)

 

Mary Wollstonecraft’s _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ really was an exceptional piece of work. Its scope by far exceeded her earlier work on the education of women – although that, Burr and Theodosia agreed, would serve as a curriculum for the education of their young daughter. He wondered whether Angelica Schuyler – Church now, he supposed – had read it yet. Miss Wollstonecraft was a friend of good Mr. Paine, and he remembered the eldest Schuyler daughter enjoying that man’s works back during the war. Not that he'd ever succeeded in having a conversation with her about them. And he certainly couldn't write her to ask now. If he and Hamilton were still on speaking terms, he would ask Eliza the next time he saw her, but their families’ once-frequent social visits were now few and far between. Perhaps Theodosia was still in touch – his and Alexander’s wives had always been the more sensible pair of them.

 

**1797: Everything is legal in New Jersey** (Hamilton)

 

Perhaps Burr should have run for office in New Jersey! Would have saved everyone a lot of trouble, and then maybe, just maybe, he would have finally had an issue to firmly stand behind. If Hamilton had read the paper correctly, Jersey had just explicitly confirmed a woman’ right to vote. What? There had always been a sort of loophole in their constitution, and he’d heard of the odd woman using it, but here it was, spelled out in black ink: “the person for whom he or she votes.” What was the world coming to?  
  
Women had always been the one issue Burr was openly passionate about. Well, sometimes openly. He'd always been open about his thoughts on women's equality, even if he'd been frustratingly tight lipped about his more _passionate_ interactions with individuals of the sex. Get the man talking about his daughters’ education, though, and Burr was the one who wouldn't shut up. Some paternal competition was all well and good, but if he had to hear one more comparison of his Angelica to Burr’s Theodosia, ending in a lecture on Wollstonecraft, he'd sorely embarrass Eliza by screaming. At least he had Philip, and would be able to brag about his son going off to a school that would never admit Theodosia. Not the College of New Jersey, though. Hamilton hated Princeton and he _hated_ Jersey.

 

**1800: Ladies, vote for Burr** (Burr, pt. 2)

 

Normally, Burr would not find meeting with widows to be terribly enjoyable. Not that he disliked them on principle, but there was a shared sorrow he did not like to linger on. When door to door campaigning brought him into New Jersey, though, it was exciting every time he met one. These women could vote! Hopefully they would vote for him. And why shouldn't they? After all, he was the only candidate who had shown himself willing to listen to them, to extend their right across the nation. _Adams_ had dismissed his own wife’s pleas on the subject, and that was back in ’76, long before Massachusetts women lost their voting rights. And don’t get him started on Jefferson’s track record. How was it that Angelica Church kept up correspondence with _that_ man, who had been so openly insulting to her sex, and wouldn’t give Burr, a steadfast disciple of Miss Wollstonecraft, the time of day on account of a few youthful indiscretions?

 

**1848: Let’s Go Upstate** (Eliza)

 

If only Angelica had lived to see this day! A gathering upstate, near Rochester, had finally written her sequel. The _Declaration of Sentiments_. The title was too gentle, her Alexander would have chosen something stronger, but Alexander wouldn’t have found the time to attend, would he? But they’d done it, done what Angelica herself should have done so long ago, and re-written Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to reflect the trials of women. They’d even had the women print their John Hancocks first, the men only an afterthought. Of course, they weren’t statesmen – but how many of those men had been, really, when they first put pen to paper in Philadelphia? – and of course the battle ahead would be long and hard. Longer, almost certainly, than the war for Independence, and wasn’t that funny. Eliza wished she had known beforehand, wished she were still young enough to travel. She would have liked to make her way upstate, and sign her name for the sister who could not.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I must confess that I was always more of an Adams kind of person when we studied the American Revolution in school. Well, an Abigail Adams kind of person. The letters she wrote John when he was in Philadelphia for the writing of the Declaration, while including plenty of domestic news for him, are far more political than the love songs in 1776 would lead you to believe. Her March 31, 1776 “Remember the Ladies” letter is wonderful, and Adams’ April 14th response is infuriating (even if he did follow it by arguing at least a little bit for women’s inclusion in the new government). While Abigail’s short letter here is my own invention, Abigail was really pissed off at John – she wrote a letter to Mercy Otis Warren (April 27) complaining about it and her next letter to John on May 7 said, “I believe tis near ten days since I last wrote you a line. I have not felt in a humor to entertain you.”
> 
> Several states/colonies, including NY, NJ, and MA allowed women to vote in the nation’s early days, but then denied them that right as they drafted their eventual constitutions and made further laws on the subject. It’s important to look not only at when women won the fight to have their votes recognized (1920), but also at when they began to be denied that right.
> 
> Olympe de Gouges made an excellent point in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen about the unfairness of a woman having the “right to mount the scaffold” but not to have any say in the laws they were charged with, or to defend themselves in court. Unfortunately, she was executed during the French Revolution because of her open criticism of women’s inequality.
> 
> Mary Wollstonecraft was the biggest, most vocal feminist of her day, and Aaron Burr had her portrait hanging up prominently in his house. And NOT in the dartboard-picture-like way that Jefferson had a bust of Hamilton.
> 
> If I remember correctly, Hamilton was generally not in favor of increased suffrage, because the populace couldn’t be trusted (he’s the one we have to thank for the mess that is the electoral college), so while I don’t know for sure, my guess is he would not have been in favor of women’s suffrage – especially since women generally tended not to receive as strong an education as their brothers, which in his mind would have made them less suitable to vote.
> 
> Women (well, some single/widowed women who owned property) could vote in New Jersey until 1807. Which means they could vote in the election of 1800.


End file.
